From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Mon 06 Feb 2006 - 10:35:17 GMT
Genetic studies concentrate on 'fixed' (per generation) genes,
but other domains are more interested in 'flux' and comparisons
(within a lifetime) in some sense (metabolomics, for example).
Is there some way of estimating turnover of memes in different
groups, as the Mbx people look at
import/export/reactions/footprint etc.? Sort of 'continuum
models' in a sense (now waving arms wildly...)
Need a bit of time to think what the hell that might mean but in
general what I'm trying to say is that we look for correlates of
rates of interest (i.e. not meme frequency change itself but
something linked) rather than direct 'counting' measures (and
anyway counting is a non-starter in many cases as I'm firmly in
the camp where a 'meme' is rarely something as simple as a
heritable gene (/cistron) anyway.
Idea #1 (therefore the worst one I will have); during periods of
flux in a freely-memetically-exchanging group [equivalent of
panmixis], should the main channels of transmission (I'm
thinking news media basically) display different distributions
of stories / turn over stories at different rates? How does
language use change to reflect the plat du jour etc.? How do the
media catering to different subsets of society behave compared
to the mainstream media?
So that's one very zoomed out angle, but there must be more.
Finding a lot more dead organisms than usual in an area might
mean ecological disturbance (but wouldn't tell us about the
nature of the disturbance) -- this is the kind of angle I'm
after (which incidentally sidesteps any worries about the
meaning of meme).
Cheers, Chris.
Derek Gatherer wrote:
>> If I want to know whether someone has a particular meme then I can ask
>> them or, less directly, observe their behaviour. Behavioural
>> observation is as you say not ideal; but if you include what they
>> write/say as part of that behaviour then things become more manageable.
>
>
> Yes, I think that statistics like membership of political parties, can
> give us a clue to what might be happening internally. There are also
> opinion polls, but these are perhaps less reliable in terms of their
> truth value.
>
> > and maybe this means that the whole concept of frequencies in
> populations is too static as a means of studying memes, and we need to
> find something >more dynamic?
>
> Absolutely. But what would it be?
>
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>
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk http://psidev.sf.net/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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